


among twenty snowy mountains

by raedbard



Category: West Wing
Genre: M/M, Porn Battle, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 06:29:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, with some people, it takes a very long time to work out what (who) you were missing. Or, a story about working out how to have what you weren't allowed to have before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	among twenty snowy mountains

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XIV. Prompt was 'apotropaic'.

When Sam asks him _so what have you been up to?_ the first answer that comes to his lips is _sleeping with a lot of people who I've only recently understood remind me of you_. 

He does not say this. He doesn't say anything for an incriminating length of time because his fingertips have begun to fizz with the knowledge of their proximity to the body that they have been unconsciously seeking. And his teeth have started to fizz with disgust at the question, at the understanding that the question needs to be asked. Propinquity has failed them, and Sam can no longer divine all there is to know about Toby's life by just looking at the way he has tied his tie. Or whatever. The kid was telepathic. And now the kid is a slightly strange, beautiful man who is beginning, finally, to show his age, though he still looks like he has twenty years, rather than the actual thirteen, on Toby.

Like little earthquakes his knees are feeling unsteady as long as he continues to look at him, at Sam's eyes. They are, as they always were (what do you think, that they would have faded out?), stupidly blue and lined with dark lashes that, these days, look poorly painted on. Toby thinks about asking him if he's wearing make-up and then decides against it. Maybe later he can test the theory with the tips of his own fingers. 

If they get past the small talk.

*

He was not supposed to have run away, but he did anyway. 'Hero' is a burdensome label, or at any rate one too heavy for his shoulders. New England seemed like an apposite place to escape to, where the damn trees and the unnaturally clean air can remind him of his guilt and he can worry about walking into Jed Bartlet every time he turns a corner.

That he teaches poli sci to kids who are going, presumably, to inherit the earth and hire guys like him to do their heavy lifting, both amuses and appalls. But it pays a wage, and no one asks him to write speeches.

He started fucking the students (only two of them, so far) by accident and only realised later who they reminded him of, who it was he was apparently missing. Both dark-headed and blue-eyed they had made absolutely no impression on his memory, triggered no conscious response. They even had they same dazed, starry look when they gazed up at him from the pillow, like he's some kind of svengali and not just a washed-up politico with a criminal record. Perhaps it was that they called him 'professor'; he can't imagine getting that kind of misguided respect from Sam.

Their bodies confuse him. He tells himself he's over-thinking what is essentially a pretty simple transaction, but he has never been very good at lying to himself. He had not understood, at first, what he wanted from them, what he seemed to be needing. The pinkness of their skin and the sweetness of their nipples, their sharp hipbones, the dark hair on their upper thighs. They both, at different moments of the different relationships, laughed and accused him of having an oral fixation and he raised an eyebrow at them and pointed out that he had been trying to give up smoking for the last five years. He sometimes wondered if he was trying to eat them, to cram into his mouth all their tastes and textures, to keep the memory safe, against some last depredation.

But, no. It was just tricks of the light, tricks played by his life. He was missing someone else, and that was the stolen thing, that was the memory lost.

He supposes, now, that he has hurt them, messed them up in some irreducible way that will not be quantified: played on their daddy issues or their ambitions to be more complex people than they are able to be at this stage of their lives. Or just fucked them in the same way that the more powerful always fuck the less, mistaking their motivations for the only ones which count. 

He wishes he could tell Sam about them.

*

They agreed, years ago, that they would not do this anymore. Would not bind each other up in unreasonable promises and compromising secrets. They would, after all, acquire enough of those through the ordinary course of their work. That was -- he glances at the clock on his bedside table, as though that will somehow help compress the years into manageable time -- nearly fifteen years ago. Signed in sweat on the steamed-up windows of several campaign buses and toasted with champagne just before midnight on Super Tuesday. They broke the promise in practice, but kept it in spirit: the hard nights of the year, the States of the Union nights, half-delirious with policy and feverish with syntax, unsure whose body was whose, which words belonged in which mouth; no one could blame them for that. Once a year, they met over the pages. And if Sam slept with other people during the other three hundred and sixty four, Toby managed not to care (because he wasn't, at the time, aware that he was interested in doing otherwise), and he himself went back to his right hand and daydreams about his ex-wife.

It took five years and a twice-broken marriage for him to get it and even now he's not sure he would call it 'love' exactly. It is a deeper, less complex thing than that, than what he felt (feels) for Andrea. It is just realising that, somewhere, a hole, a cavity, a space that was previously filled, is now empty. It is like running his tongue over the broken filling in one of his teeth, and as easy to get accustomed to the loss as it is to ignore his dentist's warnings that he needs a check-up. He won't die of the lack, but neither is he quite whole.

When Sam called he was in the shower with soap in his eyes and so annoyed by the time he got to the phone that he only remembers his nakedness when he hears Sam say 'Toby' in that way that he says the word that has only ever had resonance when spoken by two other people in his life.

He got the feeling that there was more to say, much more, than Sam was giving him but wasn't in the most advantageous position for working out what the more to say was on account of kneeling on his bed trying not to have the heart attack that's surely coming to him. He was laughing as he did it, though, aware that the imagery is cruelly appropriate and the message so clear even he can't miss it.

Which is why, he supposes, he said: _come and see me, come up and see me_.

Which is exactly what he did.

*

\-- I wouldn't really have picked this for your kind of place.  
\-- Yeah, well. There is the possibility that I have mellowed with age.  
\-- I'm not sure it's possible to mellow out of the pathological hatred of trees and green things that you have, Toby.  
\-- Maybe I've just learned to ignore them.  
\-- And trust that they aren't out to get you.  
\-- I don't know about that.

When he laughs it seems to break the icicles off the tree canopies under which they are walking. Toby is struck, for the length of a stride, at how impossible the sound it, how it seems to push into unreality all the rest of their surroundings, like they should be walking down a corridor in the west wing, or the length of Airforce One, or the back rooms of some shitty conference venue, arguing about the nuances of graph nine.

Arguing is still the easiest way to talk. That, at least, has not changed.

It seems that Sam, on the other hand, has.

Last night, last night that stands for all the other nights, that forgives all the other nights. He hadn't even needed the liquor.

It turns out that the bodies of young men for whom he is in loco parentis are not the only ones which confuse him. Sam's body comes on in a blizzard -- before Toby's had time to gather up the pieces of a coherent reaction to Sam's hand on his upper thigh and Sam's mouth swallowing up his own, Sam is unbuttoning his own shirt and when that is done pulling at the collar of Toby's, tugging on Toby's hand to stand him up (both of them now, apparently, too old to fuck on a sofa) and lead him towards the bedroom. His dimensions change when he is naked -- shoulders too broad and his chest too like a mountain, unclimbable. He can't remember (among the many things he can't remember) whether he felt like this before, when Sam was just some kid who had an uncanny ability to read his mind and blue eyes like the skies you only got once a year in Brooklyn, over Coney Island, when he was nine years old.

Sam says _Toby, Toby, Toby_ , like he's trying to reassure himself of something, like he can make the promises he needs to make to himself only over the expanse of Toby's belly and like he's been waiting to make them a very long time.

He knows, he has always known, that it is different for Sam.

Eventually they were two old men on a bed in northern Maine. Sam's mouth open to him and containing everything he seemed to need. Sam, too, makes jokes about oral fixations, just like he used to. And Toby tests everything with his own mouth, as if tongue and lips and teeth will collect all the data he could possible need to make sense of this situation, his dick sadly neglected until Sam asks, holding onto Toby's wrists like he's being lowered over a chasm, in a rare moment of less than complete candor, _will you do it_ and Toby needs a second to understand what he is asking for, and then a minute to work out if he can.

It was a first time of sorts. Not the first time, but novel all the same. Toby feels the weight of nearly fifteen years moving his body, anchoring him inside Sam, overdosing on the implications of seeing Sam spread over his bed with a pillow under his hips, with sweat forming in a sheen over the small of his back, with the apparent paleness of his hips coming up darker than Toby's own as they collide, both nearer and further apart than they have been before, when it was all throats and fingers and dark places and not this, this more honest, more selfish coming together, Sam's eyes closed and his own eyes closed, shut tight, unable to think clearly when he feels Sam closing in, unable to hold off, unable to keep his fingers from biting into Sam's waist and the meat of his shoulder, unable to stop feeling a well of sadness open up inside him in the second before it is all over.

He pressed his mouth against Sam's back, feeling the intercostal spaces shift as Sam turned over, covered in come and sweat and tangled sheets and looking so young because he looked so serious, a tiny apocalypse playing out over his face, never to be the same again.

The untidy trees in the snowy wood remind him of Sam's hair, pulled crooked against the pillows. Sam's gotten ahead again; Toby runs (slightly) to keep up.

\-- I like it here. It's ... clean.  
\-- Clean?  
\-- I suppose I mean 'pure', or, I don't know. A fresh start, maybe. A good place to try for one. But you can try to restrain your laughter if you like.

Pause. Toby looks up at the sky through the trees, through the fresh snow that has fallen on the trees, back at their footprints.

\-- Yeah.

Someone smiles first; Toby wouldn't like to say who.

\-- Yeah.


End file.
